


After

by patchfire



Series: Before, After, During [6]
Category: Glee
Genre: Episode: s05e03 The Quarterback, Gen, Travel, mental health
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-17
Updated: 2014-01-18
Packaged: 2018-01-09 01:49:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1140010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/patchfire/pseuds/patchfire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's going slightly mad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

In the end, Puck throws a dart. 

He speeds away from Lima on his bike, fully intending to enlist in the Air Force like he’d told Coach Beiste. Puck heads up I–75 to Toledo, where a cousin on his mom’s side has at least agreed to let him crash while he arranges things, meets with an Air Force recruiter, and all of that. After his first two visits to the recruiting office, though, he starts to waver, wondering what he should really do. The Air Force recruiter informs him that his chances of actually flying a plane in the Air Force are slim to none, because he doesn’t test well and has no post-high school education. 

Beiste’s comment about how the guys in _Top Gun_ were naval aviators tickles in the back of his mind, so Puck goes and meets with a recruiter from the Navy, too. The results there are disappointingly similar: he’s not likely to be able to ever fly a plane. Even if he were to somehow get a college degree, even if he were to somehow improve his test-taking skills, there are just a lot more people wanting to fly a plane than there are spots for pilots. Both the Air Force and Navy recruiters do their best to get him to enlist regardless, talking about all the other jobs he could do. 

Puck doesn’t really know what to do with the information, because he doesn’t want to join either branch only to end up feeling like an underpaid grunt with none of the glory. After four weeks, while Puck’s still wavering about what to do next, his cousin tells him he has two weeks to either find a job and contribute or get out. Puck spends the next two weeks looking for jobs and looking for another place to crash, and on the day of the deadline his cousin gave him, Puck drives across to Cleveland to stay with Jake’s mom’s sister, who apparently needs someone to help her make rent until her lease is up in September. She doesn’t want much for his share of the rent, though, which will make it easy for Puck to save up once he finds a job. 

When the first crappy minimum-wage job tells him they’ll only have him working for twenty-five hours a week, Puck goes out to find a second crappy minimum-wage job, and he starts putting up signs about pool cleaning. The season’s close enough that he has to start looking for clients, and eventually he finds a few. 

He doesn’t sleep with any of the pool cleaning clients in Cleveland. It means less pay, and that’s surprisingly depressing, when he realizes he was basically a prostitute for years and never connected the dots. It takes less time at each house, though, so he brings in more money from the pool cleaning overall. He feels like all he does is work; he doesn’t date, he doesn’t go to many movies, and he tries his best not to think about the fact that he’s grieving for Finn just as much as he was the first week after Finn died. 

His money adds up at least. He pays his small share of the rent, buys his own groceries, puts gas in his truck, and buys more pool chemicals, but by the end of the summer, Puck has enough money saved up that he feels comfortable putting in his two week notices. He’ll finish up a few days before the lease ends, and he’ll leave Cleveland then. The money he has saved will let him drive anywhere in the country that he picks, plus put down first and last month’s rent, if he can’t find a roommate situation, and even get him through until the first paycheck comes in from whatever new job he finds wherever he ends up.

The only thing left to do is decide where to go. 

Leaving Lima had helped, but Ohio still reminds him of Finn, and maybe he’s mourning too much for his best friend. That’s what his mom says when he calls home every week or two. That’s what his cousin thought, too, and he’s not sure about Jake’s mom’s sister, but she probably does. At least she doesn’t mention it when he looks sad or says he’s got more hours at work or doesn’t want to see any movies, and Puck figures the further he gets from Lima and from Ohio, the less anyone will think that’s weird. Wherever Noah Puckerman ends up, no one there will know who he used to be or how he used to act, and that’s fine with him.

All of that is in Puck’s head when he stands in front of a map of the US that he bought at the gas station. He tacks it to the wall and picks up the dart he stole from the ground outside the bar around the corner three nights earlier, and then Puck closes his eyes. He lets the dart fly, willing to go wherever it lands, as long as it’s not Ohio, or too close to Ohio. When he opens his eyes, though, the dart is in the ocean, so he snorts and retrieves it. A second try is too close to Los Angeles for Puck to want to go there, so he throws the dart a third time, his eyes squeezed tight. When he finally opens them, he nods and takes out a highlighter, running it over the route from Cleveland to the city closest to the dart. Eugene, Oregon. He’ll take I–80 west away from Cleveland, heading towards Chicago, and he won’t leave I–80 until Salt Lake City. I–84 will take him north through Idaho before taking US–20 the rest of the way west to Eugene. 

It’s a long drive, a day and a half even if he drove straight through and never stopped, which means he figures it’ll take him a good three days. “Tomorrow, then,” he says to himself, taking the map down and folding it up. It doesn’t take him long to pack up the rest of his stuff, and he collects his final paychecks before going to sleep early. He wakes up at five am, loads his truck, and starts driving west. 

It takes him six hours, including breakfast and refueling, to get to Joliet, Illinois, and he stops there, noting the date. Tuesday, September 10, 2013, then, is the last day he was in Ohio, and he doesn’t really intend on going back. It’ll make his mom sad every once in awhile, and his sister will claim to miss him when he calls, trying to make him feel guilty, but she really won’t. He can always call Jake or talk to him online, and hell, Puck knows he’s running, but he doesn’t really care. Puck lets himself linger over lunch, figuring that it makes the most sense to eat when the sun’s at its highest. Plus, lunch is cheaper than dinner at most places, so he’d rather get fast food for dinner. 

The next six hours take him out of Illinois and across most of Iowa, boring him to tears, but he stops for Subway, gas, and some cans of Red Bull before heading west again. It’s 1:30 am before he pulls off the interstate near Sidney, Nebraska, tired of looking for a truck stop. He stops at the 24-hour Walmart instead, replenishing his stock of Red Bull and pop and buying a few candy bars. He’ll have to keep driving to find a truck stop, just wanting a place to nap a few hours and maybe take a shower without having to pay for an entire night in a crappy motel room. 

It takes him another hour and a half, almost to Cheyenne, before he finds a promising-looking Pilot. It has a Cinnabon, which isn’t open yet, but he figures by the time he wakes up after a four or so hour nap, it will be. He pays for a shower and then locks himself in his truck, the alarm set on his phone. 

Puck’s tired enough that he sleeps right through the alarm, sleeping until close to ten am. At least, it’s ten eastern time, and he groans when he realizes he needs to reset his watch and everything else. It’ll be another pain in the ass to reset it again once he’s in pacific, but at least he’ll stop getting the time wrong. Convinced it’s eight am., he realizes he didn’t sleep as late as he thought, but it was still longer than he meant to. He gets a Cinnabon and decides to drive around Cheyenne for a little while. 

The town’s nice enough, and as he finds a place selling brunch even on a Wednesday morning, he thinks about staying there. He doesn’t have a particular attachment to Eugene, just a dart throw, and he’s already tired of driving. After he eats, he drives around more, nearly stopping to ask about a ‘help wanted’ sign. Something doesn’t feel right, though, and he points his truck back towards I–80. 

The signs for I–25, with mentions of Denver and other places in Colorado, make him think about taking that detour, too. It wouldn’t be far, after all, but then he remembers that a lot of rich people ski in Colorado, and in the end, he doesn’t do that well with rich people. There’s some kind of crazy Christians in Colorado, too, or at least he thinks that’s where they are, and he doesn’t want to step in that yellow jacket nest, either, so he keeps heading west on I–80 past the junction with I–25. 

He decides he made a great choice by not staying in Cheyenne, not when it takes him six hours to make it across Wyoming and to the next large city, Salt Lake City. It’s close to seven at night, mountain time, and again, Puck starts thinking about just staying. His phone says it’s another twelve and a half or thirteen hours of pure driving to get to Eugene, and while his gas money and food money are holding out, his eyes and butt are tired and sore. The exit where he stops for dinner even has ‘Congregation Kol Ami’. Puck decides to drive through the city not on the interstate, just to see what it’s like, and he’s starting to think he could stay there when he turns a corner and suddenly sees a big-ass church. 

“Mormons. Right,” he says to himself with a sigh. He’s pretty sure the Mormons would drive him nuts, so he gets on I–84 heading north around 8:30 pm. If he’s lucky, he’ll hit the truck stops outside Boise by one or two. It’s a little earlier than he wants to stop, but it isn’t far from Boise that he’ll have to leave the interstate behind, and he’d rather do that in the sunshine after some sleep. 

He pulls into the Flying J right around 1:30 am, and doesn’t have to wait for a shower. When he mentions to the clerk that he was planning to sleep in the parking lot, the clerk shakes his head and instead directs Puck down the road to the Ralfroy Motel. Puck grumbles to himself about spending the money on a motel, but he knows he can’t go any further, not on Red Bull and too–little sleep, so he drives up the road and pays for a night. 

Puck unloads everything he can’t lock inside the truck, then locks the door, puts the chainlock on, and props a chair in front of the door before pulling the curtains and falling face-down against the motel pillow. He must fall asleep within seconds, because he doesn’t even remember pulling the sheet up over himself. 

When he does wake up, everything is just how he left it, down to the chair and the chainlock, but the sheets are on top of him, so he had to have pulled them up. He groans when he turns to the side and realizes he’s slept way longer than he intended. It had been 2:30 am before he finished unloading, sure, but he still hadn’t intended for it to be over twelve hours of sleep, and he groans. He probably owes them for another night already, which means he might as well take his time showering and getting some food. 

He doesn’t have a particular destination in mind when he leaves the motel, so he just turns to the north, heading more into downtown Boise, if Boise has a downtown. The road curves around Boise State University before taking him over a river and, after a few turns, what Puck figures is the nice part of town. There’s a coffee shop there, at any rate, so Puck parks a few blocks down and walks to it, getting coffee and a sandwich before sitting at one of their outdoor tables. 

The people seem nice enough in Boise, and Puck feels weirdly comfortable in a way he hasn’t in any other town he’s stopped in. It’s only Thursday, he was still in Ohio on Tuesday morning, but it feels like an entirely different life almost. Even after all of the sleep, he’s not sure he wants to get up the next morning and keep driving. His phone says it’d be another eight hours, almost all of it on a US road instead of an interstate, and Puck decides right there that maybe Boise, Idaho, isn’t such a bad place to start over. 

He ends up buying another cup of coffee, having a long conversation with the barista about neighborhoods and places to work, and taking three numbers off the coffee shop board for people looking for a roommate. He gets another sandwich to go, to eat for dinner in a few more hours, and heads back to the motel, driving through a few neighborhoods on his way. Boise seems like a good decision, and anyway, Puck knows he wasn’t really running _to_ anything or anywhere, just _from_. Boise seems like a pretty good ‘to’.

It takes two more days before any of the roommate ads pan out. The house is between Capitol Boulevard and Americana Boulevard, but on the same side of the river as the coffee shop. The other three guys in the house are students, two at Boise State and one at Western Idaho, which may or may not be a community college. The rent is even cheaper than Puck was hoping for, and he doesn’t have to put down first and last month’s rent, or even a deposit, since the rest of them are already living there. It’s just a small bedroom, but he has his own small bathroom right off of it, and it has enough space in the kitchen that Puck doesn’t think shared food storage will be an issue.

The cheaper rent and lack of deposit lets Puck feel less panicked about finding a job at least, and he applies for several, figuring it’ll be like Cleveland and he’ll need to find two different part-time jobs. He goes back to the coffee shop, which he learns is part of Hyde Park, and applies for some restaurant jobs nearby, but he also goes down a few nearby main roads, applying at anywhere that looks likely and not too boring. He knows enough about himself to know that he’d rather work with people than in a cubicle, so when he gets offered twenty hours a week at the Capital Lumber TrueValue Hardware Store, he accepts. Even if their estimate of five hours stocking and fifteen hours with customers is off, it’s still better than a cubicle or stocking after-hours. He goes through training within a few days, and on his second day of work, he gets a call from one of the restaurants near the coffee shop. 

They offer him a job bussing tables for the dinner shift, which works out great since the hardware store closes at five every day, and is closed on Sunday completely. If either place lets him move up to full-time, it’d be easier, but twenty one place and twenty-five at the other isn’t bad. 

By the time Puck’s been in Boise for two full weeks, he can find his way around, at least as long as he stays in the places he frequents, and he has a new bank account, so he’s not hiding his cash anymore. He wakes up on Friday morning feeling pretty good about things, and he keeps feeling pretty good until just before his lunch break. 

He’s about to clock out for lunch when he hears Finn’s voice. 

He stops in his tracks, feeling frozen, before he shakes his head and rolls his eyes at himself. It’s not Finn’s voice, of course. It’s just someone that sounds vaguely like Finn, and Puck had been thinking about Finn that morning, when he couldn’t reach something and had to get a stepstool. That’s all it is, Puck knows, but it still makes him sad as he heads down the road with his lunch in hand. The fast food selection near the hardware store is bad, since Puck doesn’t like fried chicken, so most days he walks down the street with his packed-at-home lunch. 

The Catholic church is the closest garden space, and Puck knows it’ll get too cold soon to eat outside, but he likes to amuse himself thinking about the Catholic God and Jewish God arguing over what it means that Puck sits there to eat. This afternoon, though, all he can think about is his damn brain, making him think that he heard Finn. Almost six months later—or maybe more than six months, but Puck doesn’t want to figure it out precisely—and hundreds of miles away, that’s when his brain tries to give him the thing he’s been wanting to hear. 

Maybe, Puck tells himself, he just needs to be busier. He asks his boss at the hardware store if there’s any chance of more hours, since he’s already realized he could work fulltime at the hardware store and still keep bussing tables at the restaurant. The manager looks surprised, and Puck tries to explain that he’s working two jobs, but he still has too much time on his hands. 

“You could always take some classes at the community college,” one of Puck’s coworkers offers, overhearing the conversation. “I wish I had, at your age. Before you settle down with a family.”

Puck snorts. He hasn’t dated since Toledo, hasn’t had sex since Toledo, and it’s not that he doesn’t notice people when he’s out, but he just doesn’t really care. He figures pretty soon he’ll get a reputation for not dating, but it hasn’t been long enough yet. “Maybe next semester,” Puck tells his coworker. 

“Might not be too late for this one,” Puck’s manager says.

“Nah.” Puck shakes his head. “After the holidays, maybe.” Puck sighs as he turns to leave the break room/office. The holidays makes him think of Finn, how the big dork always loved Christmas so damn much, and Christmas isn’t even Puck’s holiday. It shouldn’t make him that sad, but it does. 

His manager at the hardware store does put Puck on the schedule for more hours when the October schedule is posted, and Puck hopes that helps. He gets up on Sunday and decides that maybe he should start working out again, just to give him something else to do besides work. He goes for a run, looking for a gym along the way, and finds one that looks like it won’t be too expensive. Some weight training and some cardio won’t be a bad thing, and he doesn’t want to have down time. 

Puck tries not to think about his weird moment, and mostly succeeds until over a week’s passed. He’s at work mid-afternoon, helping a customer find the right kind of nails, and as he walks past an aisle, he would swear he sees Finn. 

He’s so sure it’s Finn that he trips over his own feet, but he has to recover and keep walking towards the nails, because he has a customer following him. He can’t stare at the profile that he is sure is Finn’s. By the time his customer has found his nails and is headed for the checkout, and Puck backtracks, the aisle is completely empty. It doesn’t feel like anyone’s even been in it recently, and Puck stands at the end of the aisle staring down it for at least thirty seconds. It makes sense, in a weird sort of way, that the place where he heard someone with a voice like Finn’s, would be the place where his brain would come up with an image of Finn. Same location, but far enough from Ohio to make sure he knows it’s not real. It makes sense, in a twisted sort of way, and Puck shakes his head as he walks away from the aisle. 

He’s doing his best to start over, because he’s in Boise for the long haul, and he guesses that part of his brain just isn’t ready to let Finn go quite yet.


	2. Chapter 2

Puck notes the date that he’s been in Boise for a full month, just as he goes out the front door to run that Saturday morning, and that’s what he thinks about while he runs. He has a shift at the hardware store, a few hours to kill, and then a dinner shift at the restaurant, and Puck knows that his life looks pretty boring. A year ago, he was in LA, and probably would have agreed with that assessment. Two years earlier, he definitely would have thought his Boise life was pretty lame, but then, Puck thinks some of the choices he made two years earlier were lame at best, and closer to stupid. 

He can’t help but think that Finn’s death has at least something to do with it. Puck can think back and know it’s not _just_ Finn’s death, but the reality of suddenly, stupidly losing his best friend is still indescribable. He hasn’t mentioned Finn’s name or anything about Finn to anyone in Boise, because that part of it is still too raw. Puck meant what he said to Coach Beiste, about not knowing what to do without Finn, but he thinks that being in a different place where no one has a specific set of expectations of him, is already helping. He tried it once, going to LA, but Puck knows, a year later, LA wasn’t the best fit for him. Boise, weird as it sounds, fits him better, and Puck gets so lost in his thoughts that he accidentally runs a half-mile past his usual turnaround point. 

Even running an extra mile, he has time to drive up to the coffee shop before heading into work. The other guys at the hardware store think his ‘fancy coffee’ is hilarious, but an appreciation for a good espresso-based drink is the one thing Puck got out of his time in LA. One of the things Puck likes about Boise is that he can get pretty much everywhere he’s going in ten minutes or less, and sometimes five minutes or less, which means getting his morning coffee where he wants to isn’t a big hardship. 

Puck goes to the gym and lifts after the hardware store, then takes a quick shower at the gym before going to his other job. The manager there says that after bussing tables, most people either move up to server or bartender, but Puck doesn’t mind the repetitive work at the end of the day for now. He figures he’d rather bartend if he had a choice, but he’ll take an increase in hours at either job. 

The restaurant closes up for the night, and Puck clears his last table before heading out onto the street. He’s tired but dreading Sunday, when he doesn’t have any hours at the hardware store and half of Boise shuts down. Then looks down the street to his right, watching people at the corner cross the street, clearly headed to the pub, and he can feel his eyes widen and his body tense. There’s a guy towering over the others crossing the street, and Puck can’t see well in the dark, but his face looks enough like Finn’s that Puck could think it _was_ Finn, if Finn weren’t dead. Most of the people crossing the street go into the pub, including the tall guy, and Puck exhales, shaking his head at himself. He’s driven across the country, and that’s where he ends up starting to hallucinate. He never thought he saw Finn for the month he was in Lima after the funeral, the four weeks in Toledo, or the entire summer in Cleveland, but a month in Boise and he’s heard Finn once and seen him twice. 

He decides the next morning that he should find new football allegiances, since he's not planning to go back to Ohio, and he doesn't really want to talk about Ohio. He buys the Sunday paper and the week's _Sports Illustrated_ , then spends most of the day watching clips of Boise State because that seems like the thing to do. No one NFL team seems to be the predominant team in Idaho, so Puck decides to be a San Francisco fan. He likes red and gold better than blue and orange, and maybe that's a weird way to decide, but most of his life is pretty weird.

That makes him decide to go out to the Boise mall to look for a couple of T-shirts, and he does a double take when he realizes how much the Boise mall looks like the Lima Mall. Still, he finds a few T-shirts and a much warmer winter coat before going to the food court. He gets some food at Taco Time and sits down to eat. Halfway through his second crisp burrito, he hears Finn laughing. 

He knows it can't really be Finn, that his brain is playing tricks on him again, but it sounds so much like Finn that he almost wants to stand up and look around, to try to find him. He doesn't want to look as crazy as he feels, though, so he keeps eating his burrito and drinking his pop. Hearing and seeing his dead best friend is definitely not normal, but he doesn't have any other explanation. 

Puck does his best to put it all out of his mind as he goes to work the next morning and for the next week, but it's in the back of his mind, something he can't quite totally forget. On Friday morning, he arrives to open the store with two others, then as the customers slowly trickle in, Puck grabs some electrical supplies to restock. He's about halfway through what he has to restock when he hears Finn's voice again, this time sounding like it's just an aisle or two over. 

Puck is about to pinch himself or something when he hears his coworker _respond_ to Finn, or to the person who sounds exactly like Finn. They have a conversation that lasts at least two or three minutes, and Puck stays frozen throughout the entire thing. Nothing he hears makes him think it really is Finn, but nothing makes it obvious that it's _not_ really Finn, either. When the Finn-sounding customer goes to the front of the store, Puck follows his coworker to the back of the store.

"Hey, can you describe the guy you were just talking to?" Puck asks. 

"The big guy?" Puck's coworker says with a shrug. "Tall, muscles like a construction worker, tattoo on his left arm, longish hair. Not long enough for a ponytail." 

Puck frowns and then sighs. He knew it wasn't Finn, but part of him had still expected a different answer to his question. 

"Why? He owe you money?" Puck's coworker jokes. 

"Nah, nah, just sounded familiar," Puck says, trying to brush it off. "Even though I don't really know anyone in Boise." He laughs at himself, and luckily his coworker joins in. 

Puck spends Saturday watching the Boise State game in between jobs, and on Sunday he heads to the mall again, not really sure why. He doesn't hear Finn laughing at least, and when he gets home, he watches the end of the 49ers beating the Titans. When he heads to bed after watching a game he barely remembers, he looks at his guitar in the corner. He's carried it with him, but he hasn't picked it up since the day he sang in the choir room back at McKinley, all of them gathered to remember Finn. 

If asked, he’d say he hasn’t felt like it. It’s the truth and not the truth at the same time, and Puck doesn’t know what that means. He doesn’t know what it means that he keeps thinking that he’s hearing Finn. He wonders if it has something to do with talking to his mom, since she called him on the Thursday night before he saw the tall person on Saturday and heard a Finn-like laugh on Sunday, but that doesn’t really make much sense, since the others were all far away from any time he’d talked to anyone from Lima. 

Thinking that he’s seeing and hearing Finn is disconcerting, and as it gets colder and the nights longer, Puck wonders if he’s having some kind of mental breakdown. He used to play football and get tackled, and he used to do fight club, and maybe he damaged his brain or something. The strain of losing Finn and then moving across the country, he figures, might have made something in his brain snap. 

Monday during lunch he decides to walk into the ‘counseling center’ that’s across from the Catholic church where he usually eats, because that sounds like the place to start if you’re going crazy. They tell him he needs an appointment and the money to pay upfront, but Puck figures he shouldn’t need ‘ongoing sessions’, since he’s either completely nuts or not. He makes an appointment for Thursday afternoon, which is the day he usually doesn’t work at the hardware store, and tries once again to put all of it out of his mind. 

The counselor guy reminds Puck of the few moments he’s seen of TV preachers, or maybe fast-talking used car salesmen, trying to convince the listener how much they need whatever it is they’re peddling. He listens to Puck explain how he got there for nearly twenty minutes, then spends the remaining twenty-five minutes suggesting Puck join a grief support group that Arthur himself facilitates, that Puck take up meditation, that Puck consider training for a marathon, and finally, writing out a referral to Hyde Park Psychiatry. Puck thanks him, makes the follow-up appointment that the receptionist insists on, and then sets an alarm on his phone to call back the next morning and leave a message cancelling that appointment. 

Puck also decides to skip the grief support group, the meditation, and the marathon training, though he concedes that Arthur might be right about the psychiatry referral, and he also might be right about Puck having at least some mild depression. Since it’s still Puck’s day off from the hardware store and he has hours before he has to start bussing tables, he looks up the address for Hyde Park Psychiatry. He parks at his gym and walks the few blocks to the psychiatrist, figuring he can make his appointment and fill out his initial paperwork at the same time. That’s exactly what happens, and after he’s done, he heads back to his gym and lifts. 

It’s exactly two weeks and one day before his appointment with the psychiatrist, and Puck figures that should be soon enough for him not to go completely nuts. He thinks that for less than twenty-fours, though, because the next morning, he’s pretty sure he sees Finn. 

Puck isn’t helping a customer, and he’s not restocking, which means he’s supposed to go through the store, putting away things that are out of place and helping any customers who are standing in the aisles looking lost. That’s exactly what he’s doing, finishing putting up some measuring tapes that fell before looking down the next aisle, and he briefly thinks that now he knows what it’s like to experience a break from reality. 

Finn is standing in the aisle in the middle of the hardware store, his arms reaching up to get something down, and Puck just stares. He stares for at least ten seconds before his brain catches up and he starts cataloging all the things that are wrong with the picture in front of him. Finn doesn’t have hair that’s nearly touching his shoulders, for one thing, and the guy in the aisle is a lot more tan than Finn ever was. Finn doesn’t have a tattoo on his upper arm, either, and the fact that this guy is reaching up keeps Puck from registering what the tattoo says at first. Then the guy’s arms fall to his sides, and Puck can feel his jaw drop open. 

He’s officially going completely mad, because the Finn-looking guy his mind has created has a ‘20’ tattooed on his arm. It looks like it came straight from a football jersey, and if it were white on red, it’d look like it came straight from _Puck’s_ McKinley football jersey. Puck slowly backs away, then walks to the side, his eyes on the Finn-ghost until he can’t see down the aisle any longer, and then he bolts to the breakroom, leaning against the wall and trying to convince himself that he hasn’t gone completely crazy. 

It doesn’t really work, but he manages to calm down enough to go find some things to stock, and by the time he’s finished stocking in a corner far from where he saw the Finn-ghost, he’s calm enough to interact with customers and not seem like some kind of weird drug addict or one of the mentally ill homeless people he used to see in LA. It’s a frightening thought, living like that, and Puck resolves to make sure he goes to see the psychiatrist no matter what. Surely the psychiatrist can help, even if the marathon-running counselor couldn’t. 

He’s almost sure he hears Finn two more times before the day of the psychiatric appointment arrives, and he goes into it wondering exactly what’s wrong with him. The psychiatrist asks Puck a lot of questions about Finn, about high school, about why Puck chose to move to Boise, and then about the specifics of why he’s there. The psychiatrist takes a lot of notes, nodding frequently, and then smiles at Puck. 

“Let me reassure you, first of all, that you’re not experiencing some kind of mental breakdown.”

“I’m not?” Puck asks disbelievingly. “I’m seeing and hearing things that aren’t real.”

“You’re grieving, and grief takes many different forms for many different people. Yours are unusual, perhaps, but you don’t have any other symptoms that make me think you have any mental health issues beyond depression.”

“Oh.” Puck frowns a little, because somehow he’s expected the psychiatrist to _fix_ him, to make him stop hearing and seeing things. 

“I am going to write you a prescription for a low-dose antidepressant, however,” the psychiatrist continues. “I think that will help ameliorate some of your other symptoms and perhaps continue the recent trend of you re-engaging with previously enjoyed behaviors.”

“The huh?”

“You mentioned starting to watch football again, and working out after not doing so for some time.”

“Oh, right.” Puck shrugs. “Didn’t think about it that way.” He takes the offered prescription from the psychiatrist, however, and then drives over to the pharmacy and has it filled. It can’t hurt, Puck figures, and it might just help. 

It doesn’t help immediately, but the psychiatrist had at least warned him about that. He thinks he sees Finn in Hyde Park again over the weekend, though again from a distance. He’s not sure if he’s seeing something no one else is, seeing a person that really does look something like Finn, or just seeing someone tall with his brain adding the Finn-like features. Puck did hear his coworker talking to someone who _sounds_ like Finn, but then, Puck realizes there’s no guarantee that the person he thinks looks like Finn is the person or persons who sound like Finn to him. 

While Puck waits on the antidepressants to change something, he gets a few more hours added to his schedule at the hardware store and listens to his housemates and coworkers at both jobs start talking about Thanksgiving. No one around Boise mentions Thanksgivukkah, which makes Puck decide to actually try to find the local Jewish community. He does, but then he remembers how much he doesn’t really enjoy sitting through Shabbat services. It’s still good, he figures, to know where they are. He volunteers for the early shift at the hardware store on Black Friday, and for the late shift at the restaurant on the day before Thanksgiving and the day after Thanksgiving, and tries not to feel too sorry for himself that he really has no clue what he’s doing all day on Thanksgiving. 

Three days before Thanksgiving, Puck is pretty sure he overhears the Finn sound-alike again, having a conversation with another customer at the hardware store, which Puck figures means whatever it is, the antidepressants aren’t helping yet. On Thanksgiving, he gets up and goes for a long run, and when he gets back to an empty house, he sits down with a bowl of cereal to watch the Macy’s parade. For the first time in months, he thinks about Rachel and Kurt, wondering how they’re doing, but he doesn’t wonder enough to send them a message or even post on their Facebook walls. When the parade ends, he goes into his bedroom and stares at his guitar case for ten or fifteen minutes, then opens it. 

He stares at his guitar for a few long moments, picking it up and starting to walk away before he stops and squats in front of the guitar case. He’d forgotten that he’d stashed Finn’s hat in there. All winter the year before, he’d kept stealing it from Finn for a few days at a time, then once Finn complained enough, Puck would give it back. Puck had taken it again the day before Finn died, and Finn hadn’t even had a chance to notice. Slowly, Puck puts down his guitar and picks up the hat, holding it at eye level. 

Puck realizes after a few seconds that the hat still smells like Finn, and he takes a deep breath, closing his eyes. When he opens them, he notices a few of Finn’s hairs stuck in it, and he stands slowly, putting the hat on top of his chest of drawers and then backing away, reclaiming his guitar and sitting on the edge of his bed. 

For the first time since he was in Lima singing ‘No Surrender’, Puck starts playing his guitar, singing quietly after a few minutes pass. He stares at Finn’s hat, not really paying attention to what he’s playing and singing, and not really caring about the fact that he’s crying while he sings. His voice is hoarse before he stops, and he sets his guitar down carefully. Maybe he shouldn’t leave Finn’s hat sitting out. It probably will smell like Finn longer if he keeps it in his guitar case, not opening it often, so that’s what Puck does, carefully putting it in the guitar case and closing the case before standing his guitar on top. Then he takes a long shower. 

Puck eats Thanksgiving dinner at the Golden Corral, then goes to the movie theatre and watches _Catching Fire_. He thinks about watching a second movie, but then realizes he’ll need something to do on Christmas Eve and Christmas, too, so he skips the second movie and drives back home. 

Despite the hat, Puck doesn’t hallucinate any sights or sounds of Finn the next day, and at the end of his shift at the hardware store, Puck’s manager calls him into the breakroom/office. 

“We’re going to bump you up to thirty-five hours next month,” his manager tells him. “It was going to be just for the holidays, but Jerry turned in his notice this morning, so if you want the thirty-five hours permanently, they’re yours.”

“No, yeah, that’s great,” Puck says. “I appreciate that.”

“We’ll keep you working the early shift, seven hours plus breaks and lunch, so you can leave in time to get to your other job,” Puck’s manager explains. “Or if you do take some classes at Western Idaho in the evenings.” He hands Puck a few pieces of paper, and a glance at them tells Puck they’re about the community college. “Sound good?”

“Thank you,” Puck says. “So starting with Monday?”

“That’s right.” His manager smiles and shakes his hand, and Puck throws the papers in his truck once he gets outside. He definitely thinks having more hours will be good, but he can’t figure out why they want him to go back to school. Maybe, he decides, it looks good with TrueValue if their store has employees with more than just a high school diploma. Maybe his manager’s even got a good idea, giving his brain something else to do. 

The antidepressants must be working, Puck thinks the next morning, because he gets up and goes for a run before sitting down at his computer to fill out the application for Western Idaho. It asks for his full name, naturally, and Puck rolls his eyes at the story his mom told him for years. He only ended up ‘Noah Isaac Puckerman’ because his dad wanted his initials to be NIP, and his mom didn’t realize it right after giving birth.

Puck has no idea what kind of classes he’s going to take, but he figures he can take some general education courses or something. He has zero readers for his screenplay now. He sits down and thinks about writing in the open document, but nothing comes, most of the time, and Puck kind of figures that related to the thinking that he’s seeing and hearing Finn. Maybe one day he’ll be able to work on it again, but until he figures out how that’s going to happen, he probably _should_ look at the future, eventually doing something beyond stocking shelves and bussing tables.

Whatever he takes, he knows he’s going to steer clear of any course where the description includes ‘geography’.


	3. Chapter 3

Puck quickly finds out the downside to being honest with his manager at the restaurant. As soon as he says he’s going to need the evenings off Mondays through Thursdays, so he can take some community college courses, his manager immediately drops his hours down, six weeks ahead of time. He gives him four nights still, the four nights he’ll need off come the middle of January, but it’s still already down below twenty hours. The only consolation is that it’s the opposite schedule of what he’ll have starting with classes, with his weekend nights free. 

It means his schedule in 2014 is going to suck, Puck realizes, unless he can live off just the money from the hardware store. It’d mean a drop in pay of about twenty percent, which is doable, but he doesn’t want to try it immediately. He can still manage to pull in fifteen hours or so a week at the restaurant, and if nothing else, he can put some money back and then quit the restaurant.

All of the manager’s messing with Puck’s schedule does mean that it’s the first Friday night in a long time that he can remember having free. He thinks about heading to a movie or somewhere else in Boise, but in the end, decides to go up to Hyde Park, stopping for a coffee and walking around before picking a restaurant for dinner. Once he’s done there, he still doesn’t feel like heading home, so he decides to check out the pub. There’s live music starting at nine, and the chalkboard says the band is ‘Avery Sound Decision’. 

Puck manages to get served a beer, flashing his own ID and hoping that the low light, his confidence, and his overall appearance will be enough to fool the bartender. It is, like it usually is in Boise, and Puck sits back, listening to the music and scanning the crowds. The antidepressants seem to have really kicked in, because he’s been playing his guitar and having more energy, but he still misses Finn, still thinks he heard him the other day, and still has no real interest in dating. A couple of girls even wink at Puck, but he doesn’t manage to muster up a grin, his mind elsewhere. In the end, he thinks, the antidepressants help with whatever brain chemistry stuff the psychiatrist told him about, but they can’t make him stop missing Finn, and they can’t make him less sad. It’s still better than it was before he started them.

The pub gets more and more crowded, and Puck turns away from the main area for a few minutes to get another beer and discuss the Heisman candidates with the guy next to him. Puck’s pretty sure the budding trend of awarding the Heisman to freshmen should stop before it starts, but the other guy isn’t persuaded, and it takes Puck a few minutes to get out of the conversation. When Puck starts looking around the room again, several tables have changed occupants, and Puck almost chokes on his beer when he sees the Finn-ghost at one of them, talking to someone else who is clearly listening. 

That rules out the idea that Puck’s seeing things that aren’t there at all. Unfortunately, it only leaves two options: the idea of Puck’s brain adding Finn-like features or the guy _actually_ looking that much like Finn, just with longer hair and a tan, like he’s been out _Brokeback Mountain_ -ing all summer or something. The thought of Finn spending all summer up in some mountains on horseback makes Puck snort and frown, but he keeps staring at the Finn-ghost, who is apparently a Finn look-alike and not a ghost at all. 

Puck thinks he’s being discreet, staring over the top of his beer, but after some time passes, the guy talking to the Finn look-alike notices him. He stares back for just a few seconds, then says something to the Finn look-alike. Whatever the guy says to the Finn look-alike, it makes the Finn look-alike turn towards Puck. Puck blinks, trying to seem like he’s watching the women at the table behind the Finn look-alike, but the Finn look-alike takes one look at Puck before going pale. Puck wonders for a minute if the Finn look-alike is going to throw up, but then the Finn look-alike just stands up and bolts out of the pub entirely without saying a word to the guy he was with. He doesn’t throw down any money for his half-finished beer or anything, but the guy who was with him does, glaring at Puck before leaving the pub, clearly going after the Finn look-alike but not in a great deal of a hurry. 

Puck exhales loudly enough that he can hear himself over the sound of the band, and he startles a little when he realizes the entire thing, from the moment the other dude saw him staring until they were both gone, took less than thirty seconds. Puck drains his beer in one long gulp and signals for a third. He’s so far gone that he’s running people out of pubs, so if he has to take a cab and get his truck in the morning, he will. 

He switches to pop after the fourth beer, though, and by the time the band packs up and the employees lock the pub, it’s been hours since Puck had any alcohol. He drives aimlessly around Boise, fully aware it’s the middle of the night, but he can’t bring himself to go home just yet. Puck’s brain crossed the line from bothering him to bothering other people, and he doesn’t know what to do about it. He’s going to have to do something or control his reactions better, and since he doesn’t know what else to do, that only leaves controlling his reactions and being more discreet. 

Puck feels exhausted as he goes through his run the next morning, and he orders the largest size available of his usual coffee drink before he goes to work. He manages to hang on through the end of his shift and even go lift at the gym, but afterwards, he doesn’t know what to do. Going to the pub had been a disaster, but his restaurant manager had made it clear that Puck wasn’t getting any weekends until mid-January, and then only because it was more trouble to fire Puck and hire someone else than it was to keep Puck, so Puck knows it’s no good trying to call and get a shift. He’s still tired, but not tired enough to go to bed at dinnertime.

Puck decides to find a local brewing company or something, but not one in Hyde Park, and that’s how he ends up in the northeast part of Boise at the Sockeye Brewery. He does his trick with the ID and gets a pint of their flagship beer, which is definitely better that whatever bottled beer he was drinking the night before. He tries a few of their other beers before changing to pop later in the night. The food there is good, too, and Puck doesn’t see anyone the entire night who is anywhere close to Finn’s height. No one there sounds like Finn or looks like Finn, and that was pretty much Puck’s goal for the evening. Whoever the Finn look-alike is, he probably isn’t going to drive to northeast Boise just for the Sockeye Brewery, no matter how good their pale ale is.

He spends the next week or so of December feeling aimless, probably because Hanukkah’s already over and done, even if he barely celebrated it. He goes ahead and volunteers for the extra holiday shifts at both jobs, which makes most of his coworkers appreciative, even if it doesn’t put him back on the restaurant manager’s good side. 

Puck has to be grudgingly impressed with his mind, because one afternoon he’s absolutely convinced one day that he hears Finn’s voice singing ‘Jingle Bells’. He goes to the gym after that to lift before spending his entire shift bussing with his earbuds in, listening to Journey’s Greatest Hits. It makes him wonder if anyone ever recorded any glee club performances or even just all of them singing in the choir room, but he doesn’t know who to ask, even if he wanted to contact any of them. Lauren would probably know, but Puck definitely doesn’t feel like contacting an ex-girlfriend, not when he doesn’t really want to talk to _anyone_ from Lima. The only person he cared about after graduation was Finn, anyway.

When he gets home from his shift, he looks up New Directions on youtube instead, and finds their Nationals performances from junior year the most easily. He shakes his head and scrolls through the comments about the ‘t-rex eating the Jew’ and then shakes his head again at most of ‘Light Up the World’. They look so young to him, all of them, even himself, and it’s not even been three years yet since they were in New York. It takes a little more digging, weirdly, to find their Nationals-winning performances. He watches the girls just once and skips Rachel’s solo, but whoever did the shooting of the video loved Finn in ‘Paradise by the Dashboard Light’, and Puck can’t stop himself from watching it at least three times. Puck finds himself wishing there was video of ‘We Are the Champions’, but he can’t find anything, and he sighs as he closes his laptop and crawls into bed. 

The Thursday before Christmas, Puck goes to one of Western Idaho’s ten or so campuses to figure out what classes to take and what financial aid he qualifies for. It’s something to do at least, though he still has no clue really what he’s going to do after he finishes the general education courses that he gets signed up for. He’s not sure exactly which campus his classes are on, even, but he leaves the office with a map, a schedule, a list of the textbooks for his classes, and the date that his financial aid is supposed to be disbursed. He decides to find the campus, at least, which takes a little time, but classes themselves don’t start until after mid-January. Puck cynically thinks that will give him plenty of time to think he’s hearing Finn, or possibly scare the Finn look-alike a time or two more. 

When a few days pass without thinking he hears or sees Finn, though, Puck does start hoping for it again. It’s a cruel trick of his brain, sure, but it’s the only way he even gets to pretend. It’s probably not a healthy way to handle grief, and he knows that, but despite the antidepressants and the reassurance of the psychiatrist, he knows he’s going a little crazy. In the end, he thinks it’s kind of nice to see or hear Finn, even for just a few seconds. 

Which is probably why, when he thinks he hears Finn the day before Christmas Eve, he closes his eyes for a few moments, trying to hold on to the sound of Finn’s voice. The hardware store has a few Christmas wreaths still around, enough to make the entire store smell like Christmas trees, and the combination of Christmas tree smell and a Finn sound-alike makes Puck smile. Finn loved Christmas, and Puck kind of wishes he could see Finn excitedly opening at least one more present. 

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day pass slowly for Puck. He eats out for most of his meals and goes to too many movies. The result is that it’s an actual relief to head into work on Thursday morning. There’s a lot of stuff to move around at the store now that Christmas is over. Most of it gets moved to the front of the store and marked down for clearance, but some of it is just plain thrown away, like the Christmas wreaths. Moving things around takes most of the day, since just when they think they’ve finished, someone will find a stand of Christmas lights or a forgotten outdoor light display. All of it keeps Puck busier than usual, busy enough that he doesn’t have too much time to go back over every thought he had the day before. He’d thought about Carole having to have Christmas without her kid for the first time and how other people are coping and what Finn might have gotten for Christmas if he’d still been alive. None of it had left him in a very good mental place.

Friday isn’t as busy, and against Puck’s better judgment, he goes out that night, back to the Hyde Park area and not to another part of the city. It’s cold out, but he’s standing on the sidewalk at one point, going from restaurant to pub, when he hears the Finn sound-alike again. 

Puck closes his eyes, because otherwise he’ll try to find out if the sound-alike is the same as the Finn look-alike, and he doesn’t want to scare the poor bastard again. Keeping his eyes closed also lets him pretend for a little while, that Finn’s alive and everything’s okay, and that’s probably creepy and weird in a way he doesn’t want to examine. It still feels better than keeping them open. 

He keeps his eyes closed for a little too long, not opening them until he starts to get cold, and at that point, Puck decides not to go into the pub after all. For a few moments, he felt pretty good, and he doesn’t want to take the chance of ruining that by scaring the Finn look-alike again or something. He goes out to Sockeye on Saturday night and Sunday night, and decides he’s going to spend New Year’s Eve watching the ball drop in Times Square from the comfort of his living room. What he doesn’t plan on is his reaction to the New Year and the countdown, but as the year ends and 2014 begins, Puck lets out a long sigh of relief, and he can feel tears on his cheeks. 

Unfortunately, or at least unfortunately in Puck’s mind, he has the next day completely free of work, so he finishes off his beer and gets out another one, watching one of his housemates’ DVDs until after two in the morning. He tries to sleep in, but he’s still up earlier than he wants to be, and he goes for a run, feeling like some kind of New Years’ cliche. He goes to eat at Golden Corral and watches yet another movie, then spends the evening playing on his guitar and trying to convince himself not to smell Finn’s hat more than once or twice. 

Puck even tries to tell himself on Thursday morning, as he goes for a run, lifts, and then checks in with the psychiatrist, that 2014 is going to be different. He’s not going to go crazy. As nice as hearing Finn’s voice and seeing someone close to Finn in appearance has been, he has to go on with his life. He even makes it through Thursday with that resolve.

On Friday, though, it falls apart before eleven in the morning. He hears the Finn sound-alike talking to someone in a nearby aisle, and Puck leans against the shelves and closes his eyes. He doesn’t care what the Finn sound-alike is talking about, he just wants to listen to him. He considers very briefly trying to find the Finn sound-alike, to put to rest once and for all the idea that the Finn sound-alike and the Finn look-alike could be the same person, but he doesn’t. He stands in the aisle as the conversation continues, and when it moves towards the front of the store, he slowly walks up the aisle he’s in. He realizes that he’s about to find out what the Finn sound-alike looks like regardless of what he planned, and Puck takes a deep breath. A customer stops him a few seconds later, though, asking where he can find the LED lightbulbs, and Puck pastes on a smile and tries not to sigh as he hears the Finn sound-alike going through checkout and then leaving the store. 

After that, Puck decides not to go out at all over the weekend. He watches too much TV, plays his guitar, goes grocery shopping, sniffs at Finn’s hat like some kind of creeper, and stares at his screenplay for several hours without typing anything, on both Friday night and Saturday night. On Sunday he goes to the mall and eats in the food court before watching the playoff game with the 49ers in the bitter cold of Wisconsin. 

Puck decides on Monday morning that he needs to find something else besides the pub and Sockeye Brewery for the weekend, because he doesn’t want to scare the Finn look-alike at the pub and Sockeye isn’t great enough to justify driving across the city that often. He gets up to Hyde Park a little earlier than he needs to, enough time to grab a coffee and scan their notice board. 

The Boiler Club, which is apparently between Hyde Park and Puck’s house, has an open mic night on Saturday nights, and Puck decides that might be the thing to do. He can take his guitar and sing a little, and it’ll keep him away from the pub for at least one night. It still leaves Friday night and Sunday night, but spending Sunday night at home probably isn’t a bad idea and may even be something he needs to get used to doing, since going to community college probably means homework, too. 

On Friday night, he heads to the movie theater and watches _American Hustle_ , which is a great distraction, and on Saturday after work and lifting weights, Puck showers and then heads out to find The Boiler Club. The list of people signed up for open mic night is long but not so long that Puck won’t have a chance to play, and he sits back near the wall on one side to listen to the people ahead of him on the list. There’s a variety of songs and a couple of spoken word poems thrown in, too, plus a bagpipe player. Puck’s turn arrives sometime after ten, and he squints at the bright lights as he sits down. 

It’s been a long time since he performed under lights, he realizes, and he looks down at his guitar to tune it while his eyes adjust. His gaze lands on his open guitar case, Finn’s hat lying in it, and Puck nods to himself, deciding what to play and sing at that moment. He starts the introduction slower than the recorded tempo, though, giving himself a little extra time to compose himself before he starts to sing. 

_Come out Virginia, don't let me wait_   
_You Catholic girls start much too late_

There’s scattered polite applause as the people listening realize what song he’s singing, a slower and more melancholy version than he’s done in the past, and he swallows hard as he continues. 

_But they never told you the price that you pay_   
_For things that you might have done…_   
_Only the good die young_

The applause is louder than it has been for some performers, at least, and Puck carefully puts his guitar away before leaving the stage area and sitting back at the same table. A couple of people nearby compliment his playing and singing, suggesting that he should be sure and come back the next week. Puck shrugs noncommittally, but it’s not a bad idea. He _had_ missed playing and singing, but he hadn’t realized that he missed performing a little bit, too, and it keeps him away from the pub for at least one weekend night. 

Of course, as he heads home, he realizes that in two more weeks, he’s scheduled to be working on Saturday nights, along with Friday and Sunday nights. Now that he’s gotten used to having a few nights off, he’s not so sure he wants to go back to being required to be somewhere every single night. 

The thought stays with him the next morning while he goes for his run, and Puck ends up spending a good deal of his Sunday figuring out if he can afford to quit the restaurant job. He figures he’ll have to pack a lunch to work all but one day, instead of just two or three days, and maybe adjust a few other things, but he feels good enough about it that he types out a two week notice and finds an open copy shop to print it out, so he can take it to his manager the next morning. He’ll have to work one weekend at the restaurant after classes start, unless the manager just tells him not to bother, which Puck mentally concedes is equally a possibility. 

That’s pretty much what happens. His manager tells Puck to work through Thursday and then consider himself done with the restaurant, which works fine for Puck. On Tuesday, Puck thinks he sees the Finn look-alike for a few seconds, but he makes himself not turn around and look closer, because if it’s the same guy from the pub, he doesn’t want to scare him again. Before his final shift at the restaurant, Puck drives out to the Western Idaho bookstore to find what he needs for his classes. 

Since Puck had no idea what he wants to do when he registered—and still has no clear idea, if he’s honest—the advisor had suggested fulfilling some basic requirements that he’d need no matter what direction he went. The result is that his classes are all over the place: fundamentals of oral communication, which Puck assumes means making speeches; English composition, which Puck’s already dreading; precalculus; and general psychology. Puck thinks he’s probably crazy, taking college classes, but after he leaves the bookstore he drives over to the campus where his classes will actually be and figures out where he’s going to have to park. All of that done, Puck heads to his last shift, and he flips off his manager as he leaves—behind the guy’s back, but it’s still satisfying. 

On Saturday night, Puck goes back to The Boiler Club, getting there a little earlier to make sure he can claim his table. He puts his name on the list, same as the week before, and listens to a similar mix as the week before, with one more spoken word poem and one less bagpipe performance. 

He doesn’t speak once he gets on the stage, just settles on the stool under the lights and starts to play. 

_If I walk down this hallway_   
_Tonight, it's too quiet_   
_So I pad through the dark_   
_And call you on the phone_   
_Push your old numbers_   
_And let your house ring_   
_Till I wake your ghost_

Puck is absurdly proud of himself for not crying as he sings, and he leaves the stage to the same relatively generous applause as the previous week. A couple of people tell him that they’re glad he came back, and Puck decides at that point that even if he’s exhausted from working and school, and even if money gets tighter than he thinks it will, he should make sure to do the open mic nights. It’s not that the rest of Boise isn’t friendly, but the crowd at The Boiler Club is more comfortable to Puck, somehow. 

The hardware store has a sale on Monday, which Puck thinks is pretty weird, since he suspects Martin Luther King, Jr., didn’t care much about discount hammers. On Tuesday after work, he goes and sits in a classroom for the first time in over eighteen months, and he quickly decides precalc might actually be okay, but not so much on the English. 

On Wednesday at work, he hears the Finn sound-alike again. Part of him knows it’s dumb, but he moves over a few aisles until he’s pretty sure he’s just one aisle over from the Finn sound-alike. He tries to move quietly up the aisle, looking through the shelves and trying to get a glimpse of the person talking. 

Puck can’t get a good look from the angle he’s at, not until the Finn sound-alike starts walking again, and for a split second, Puck can really see almost all of the guy. He’s about ninety percent sure that the Finn sound-alike is actually the Finn look-alike. That stops him, feeling more frozen than he ever has, through all the times he’s thought he’s heard or seen Finn in Boise. There’s a guy one aisle away from Puck that sounds like Finn and looks like Finn, if Finn had grown his hair out and gotten almost a year older, and Puck can’t move. He doesn’t know what to do.

As the sound of Finn’s voice—the Finn sound-and-look-alike’s voice, Puck’s brain corrects—fades, Puck manages to get himself to the back of the store, where he locks himself in the staff bathroom. 

It doesn’t seem to be affecting his ability to go to work or even take classes, but he’s clearly hallucinating. The psychiatrist was wrong. He’s not just going crazy, he’s all the way gone.


End file.
